5. The Miller brothers originally planned to hand draw the game.

6. The creators were highly opposed to a soundtrack.

Robyn Miller wrote a soundtrack for part of the game to demonstrate to publishers Broderbund how poorly music would fare in the game. “Instead it worked really well,” Miller says.

7. The single speed CD-Rom drives the game was designed for were really, really slow.

So slow, according to Miller, that they had to plan very specifically where to put related data on the game disc. Otherwise, says Miller, “we wouldn’t have been able to pull from the drive fast enough to play this game.”

8. When the Miller brothers started Myst, they had no way to display video.

Those famous static-heavy videos of the trapped brothers only became possible halfway through development, with the release of Quicktime.

9. Original playtesting of the game was done without playing the game.

The Miller brothers asked testers to imagine certain scenarios, like being washed up on a dock with a door to the left and a staircase straight ahead, and respond by asking questions about the environment. Says Robyn Miller, “It worked incredibly well.”